You’ve heard of Kilobyte, Megabyte, and Gigabyte. You’ve likely heard of Terabyte. But do you know the future sizes of file storage?

A byte is a single unit of measure in computing, capable of storing one character. A kilobyte (KB) is comprised of 1,024 bytes. (Bytes are measured by a binary system, not a decimal system, so the numbers are not “even”.) Then, similar to the metric system, you go up in measure:

1 megabyte (MB) = 1,024 KB

1 gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 MB

1 terabyte (TB) = 1,024 GB

Currently, terabyte drives are as large as they get. In fact, just this year, they have released a 6 TB hard drive, so that’s pretty large. That’s 6,144 GB of storage!

But they do have the names of the future storage amounts that may be available in the future.

1 petabyte (PB) = 1,024 TB

1 exabyte (EB) = 1,024 PB

1 zettabyte (ZB) = 1,024 EB

1 yottabyte (YB) = 1,024 ZB

To put that into perspective – A yottabyte is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes. That’s 1 septillion, if you were wondering (had to look that one up, too)!

Will we see yottabyte storage in the future? Probably not likely in any near future, but then again, not all that long ago, tech people were saying a few hundred megabytes of storage was all we’d need!